My fiancée dragged me kicking and screaming to Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird. The trailer, which presents the film as 90 minutes of an angsty high school girl fighting with her mother, did not incite me to rush to my local theater. Yet after the film review website Rotten Tomatoes announced last Monday that Lady Bird had broken its all-time record for consecutive positive reviews, I put prejudices aside.
Within minutes, one sees the acting is stellar. Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan, in particular, as mother Marion and daughter Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, turn in magnificent performances. But credit goes to writer and director Greta Gerwig for subverting the audience’s saccharine expectations at every turn. Gerwig offers a brutally honest vision of humanity and transcendence, avoiding sentimentality with masterful precision — a Herculean accomplishment in a film about a suburban teenage girl who struggles with identity, romance, family, and faith. The movie’s honesty derives from its meticulous specificity: robust characters, all with their own vivid inner lives, try with all of their might to be the ‘best version of themselves’ amidst the myriad particularities of Sacramento in 2002. Nevertheless, no character escapes his own foibles, and the inevitable suffering and regret that follow disquiet the audience’s comfortable illusions of our own identities and relationships.
In an interview with American Magazine, Gerwig reflected on the importance of particularity to Lady Bird. “I wanted to make a movie about home and what home means,” she explained. “The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes” — a fitting observation for a film released at the start of Advent.
The story is so instantly engrossing, for much of the movie I missed Lady Bird’s essential, pervasive Christianity. The film takes place at a Catholic high school. Our protagonist’s name is Christine. The nearest to catharsis Gerwig takes Christine occurs in the hymn-filled rafters of a church.
Audiences may have difficulty identifying the unrelenting emotional quality that makes the film so hard to pin down. The confounding unity of Lady Bird its depiction of financial strain, awkward adolescence, filial regret, natural humor, and overbearing love, offers its audience a glimpse of joy — not as a modern materialist might call the happy satisfaction of desire, but in the Christian sense of unfulfilled longing. C.S. Lewis explains,
“Joy—that sharp, wonderful Stab of Longing—has a lithe, muscular lightness to it. It’s deft. It produces longing that weighs heavy on the heart, but it does so with precision and coordination. … It dashes in with the agility of a hummingbird claiming its nectar from the flower, and then zips away. It pricks, then vanishes, leaving a wake of mystery and longing behind it.”
***Spoilers***
The film persistently portrays leftist characters spouting nihilism as glib and ridiculous. Christine, at her most petulant, mocks the Republican Party by empty insinuation, and Howard Zinn appears as a punchline. By the end of the film, Christine asks a new classmate, “Do you believe in God?” When he responds with a frivolous laugh, she chides him for his shallow thinking with a sudden meditation on grace. She wonders, “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don’t believe in God.”
In the final scene, Christine stands in a church before a choir as a solitary tear of joy falls down her cheek. Outside, she calls and leaves her mother a message of love, gratitude, and near-apology, quickly abandoned for the reiteration of love. Christine signs her message, not with the allusive nickname she bestowed upon herself, but with the particular Christian name given by her mother.
Lady Bird’s delicate balance, as a work of art and within each artistic component, ultimately matches the film’s form to its content as a beautiful exercise in grace.